Thursday, June 12, 2014

The Ruin Academy in Taitung, Taiwan is situated in an old sugar factory out of duty. The Ruin Academy is an organic machine. It has grown into the abandoned industrial machinery like an architectural creeper and is now producing humane sugar: creativity.

The Ruin Academy is continuing its bio-urban research on the multidisciplinary design methodology of the Third Generation City, the organic ruin of the industrial city, urban scale organic machine. The research is tied with local knowledge and is operating freely in-between different disciplines of art and science within the general framework of bio-urban built human environment.

Ruin Academy is an avant-garde fragment of the International Society of Biourbanism, a laboratory which is focused on the biological restoration of the industrial city through punctual interventions as a form of bio-urban acupuncture.

Ruin Academy is hosting a series of workshops for Taiwanese and international universities and citizen groups. It is producing multidisciplinary research and design for real-life cases in Taitung and Taiwan at large. As a creeper the Ruin Academy can slowly grow to occupy and activate new corners of the Sugar Factory machine. We are industrial insects and the Sugar Factory is our hive for insect architecture.

In the Sugar Factory the Ruin Academy operators are working and living in a machine. The industrial control is opened up in order to let nature to step in. The machine is now growing bamboo, vegetables and fruits. Openings on the roof are letting rainwater to irrigate the different organic layers growing on the machinery. The concrete slab on the floor is penetrated with big holes so that bigger trees can root in the original ground. There is a traditional Finnish sauna in one of the big processing tanks.